On Friday 27 February, Big Think partner PwC hosted its second global webcast focused on the question, ‘What would you do if you were not afraid?’ The webcast was part of ‘Aspire to Lead: The PwC Women’s...

Designers of the new federal system for sending emergency alerts to our cell phones devoted at lot attention to setting up the technical aspects, but not enough to figuring out what the messages should say....

My Four Heroes

In terms of how inventors in history influenced me, there’s so many that it’s hard to necessarily pick a few, but certainly Edison and Tesla would be good examples. They’re each great men in their own right. In the case of Edison, he was much more of a trial and error kind of guy, but willing to try all sorts of things. And I think he was quite pragmatic and sensible.

Tesla was the archetypal crazy genius who could design amazingly complicated things in his head. He really understood the theory and applied the scientific method very well. So he was less of a sort of a trial and error guy, and more about theory and experiment. But then he wasn’t as good in terms of being practical and sensible.

Those two certainly have inspired me in a lot of ways. And then there’s many other people in history as well. Winston Churchill was one of my heroes as well as Darwin, who was an amazing writer. Everyone should read The Origin of Species, it’s really, really good.